Wednesday, February 21, 2018

I'M GUESSING THAT DANA LOESCH'S DEBATE PARTNER WON'T BE IN THE ROOM

I got a lot wrong in this post, but I was right to predict that Loesch wouldn't attack the students and parents. She faked a lot of concern she doesn't have, and pretended that the NRA cares about keeping guns out of the hands of dangerous people when it's never cared about that. I love the Parkland kids, but I wish one of them had known how much she was distorting her history, and the NRA's. Jake Tapper, the moderator, surely knows -- I wish he'd said something. But I assume he thought it was his job to moderate, not to weigh in.

The National Rifle Association will participate in CNN's nationally televised town hall Wednesday with students, parents and community members who were affected by last week's school shooting....

The NRA accepted CNN's invitation to participate in the town hall and national spokeswoman Dana Loesch will represent the organization.

Loesch is a nasty piece of work, but she's a pro -- I strongly suspect she'll have the sense not to attack student survivors or their parents. I assume she'll just devote all her airtime to demonizing people who aren't there to defend themselves. Among her likely targets will be celebrities who've given money to the upcoming March for Our Lives. (Expect the canned talking point that rich celebrities like George Clooney and Oprah have armed bodyguards, so why shouldn't ordinary Americans have ... um, armed teachers?) She might scapegoat video games and movies and TV, and have the gall to accuse the news media of sowing division. She'll definitely use the word "evil" a lot. She'll probably attack the godless secular culture (opening phrase of the recent New York Times profile of Loesch: "Dana Loesch has a biblical inscription tattooed on her forearm"). And she might try to take the moral high ground (yes, from people who've just endured a massacre of children) by bringing this up:

In [her] book, she recalled her grandfather standing on the porch one night with a shotgun in his hands. Ms. Loesch’s aunt had just arrived; her estranged husband had threatened to kill her.

“Looking back,” Ms. Loesch said, “I think I always wanted to know that I was safe.”

She's a professional propagandist. The other attendees aren't. She might find a way to bamboozle a lot of people with talking points that will sound reasonable because they won't be examined carefully in real time. Or maybe I'm wrong and she'll go feral, because, in her epistemically closed world, that will seem like the best way of owning the libs, even if it appalls every non-right-wing viewer. We'll see.